Abstract
The ability to control the interaction between nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond and photonic and/or broadband plasmonic nanostructures is crucial for the development of solid-state quantum devices with optimum performance. However, existing methods typically employ top-down fabrication, which restrict scalable and feasible manipulation of nitrogen-vacancy centres. Here, we develop a general bottom-up approach to fabricate an emerging class of freestanding nanodiamond-based hybrid nanostructures with external functional units of either plasmonic nanoparticles or excitonic quantum dots. Precise control of the structural parameters (including size, composition, coverage and spacing of the external functional units) is achieved, representing a pre-requisite for exploring the underlying physics. Fine tuning of the emission characteristics through structural regulation is demonstrated by performing single-particle optical studies. This study opens a rich toolbox to tailor properties of quantum emitters, which can facilitate design guidelines for devices based on nitrogen-vacancy centres that use these freestanding hybrid nanostructures as building blocks.
Highlights
The ability to control the interaction between nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond and photonic and/or broadband plasmonic nanostructures is crucial for the development of solid-state quantum devices with optimum performance
Precise control of critical structural parameters of such hybrid nanostructures, including size, composition, coverage and inter-particle spacing represents a major achievement of our current work, and is a pre-requisite for investigating the underlying physics and further engineeringrelated optical properties, which is absent in prior attempts[27,28]
The surface density of nuclei is determined by the density of PVP molecules anchored on the ND’s surface and the size of external nanoparticles can be independently controlled by the growth time and temperature, which makes it possible to finely control structural parameters of metal nanoparticles on the surface of the ND
Summary
The ability to control the interaction between nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond and photonic and/or broadband plasmonic nanostructures is crucial for the development of solid-state quantum devices with optimum performance. When the diamond’s size is reduced to nanometre scale (named ‘nanodiamond’, ND), its confined NV centres are naturally close to the surface This can offer a unique opportunity to couple the NV quantum emitters in NDs to other external functional units on surface (for example, photonic, plasmonic or spintronic nanostructures), leading to the emergence of various physical interactions that can engineer unique characteristics of quantum emitters, depending on the interplay between their localized optical energy states[18,19]. Magnetic dipole coupling between the NV centres and the optically oriented spins in semiconducting or magnetic nanostructures on the surface might enable a new class of self-assembled quantum systems[24,25,26] The strength of such fundamental interactions strongly depends on the inter-particle spacing and the nature of external functional units. These as-synthesized hybrid nano structures offer a toolset capable of tailoring properties of NV centres via various coupling interactions and strength, and are fundamentally different from those structures in prior study[9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
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